Midwinter Break

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Who does the hoovering?’

  Gerry nodded slowly, conceding.

  ‘Why is it always me,’ he said, ‘who has to fill the stapler?’

  Stella didn’t even smile this time. She remained silent for a while then said, ‘How would the gardener end a relationship, do you think?’

  Stella was hunched with her arms folded. Gerry persuaded her to unfurl, to sit in a relaxed fashion like him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘This is not good. I feel very shaky. After the goings-on today.’

  ‘Maybe it’s your blood sugar.’

  Stella rustled in her pocket and produced her Werther’s. There were only two left. She offered one to Gerry and took the last one herself.

  ‘Calm me down,’ she said, rattling the sweet about her mouth.

  ‘Maybe we should have some lunch.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t face it.’

  They stood. Stella went out of her way to dispose of the sweet papers in a waste bin. Back on the street they came to a place where flowers had accumulated. Bouquets lay on the pavement, in cellophane wraps – some blackened, some withered, one or two fresh and brightly coloured. There were cards and tokens. They were also heaped in bunches on the adjoining traffic island protected by zinc barriers.

  ‘They treat flowers the way they treat bicycles,’ Gerry said. ‘Just leave them lying around. Think how many gardeners it took to produce this lot.’

  Stella leaned over and tried to decipher what was written on the cards. Some of the ink had faded, some had run in the rain. The name of Van Gogh appeared again and again. Stella said, ‘It can’t be anything to do with the painter.’

  ‘It must be the guy who was murdered a few years ago.’

  ‘The filmmaker,’ said Stella. ‘He was stabbed or shot.’

  ‘Both, I think.’

  ‘It was a religious thing, wasn’t it?’

  Gerry watched her. She stood with her hands joined in front of her, her head bowed.

  ‘This is not good,’ she said. ‘I feel very shaky.’

  He took her by the arm and they walked down the street. They came across a taxi rank and Gerry opened the back door of a cab and ushered Stella in.

  ‘Just back to the hotel,’ she said. ‘I need a lie-down.’

  Gerry named the hotel for the driver. He turned to Stella.

  ‘You’ve gone a bit pale.’

  He took her hand and her skin was icy. By the time they got into the hotel lobby she had warmed a little. Still he held her hand.

  ‘Are you going for a sleep?’

  She nodded but made no sound.

  ‘Then I think I’ll go for a wander. Have you got a key?’ Again she nodded. He walked her to the lift and summoned it. It seemed to take ages. She stood watching the red glow of the pressed button, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. The doors slid open and he guided her into the empty space.

  ‘I’ll not be long,’ he said. He kissed her lightly on the cheek and backed out of the lift.

  ‘Be as long as you like,’ she said.

  Stella met herself in the lift mirror. How white she was. How exhausted. She flinched, looked at her feet, closed her eyes until the lift stopped at her floor. It shuddered a little and the doors opened.

  In her room she stepped from her shoes and lay down on the bed. She did not bother to get beneath the bedclothes but enveloped herself in the heavy bedcover. The luxury of the material, its weight and warmth, made her sigh out loud. But she couldn’t sleep. Her head was still racing. Her eyes were closed but pictures were still coming to her. There was an inevitability about them. Trying to sort out the miracle from what was possible. Trying to chronicle the journey of the projectile. The sparrow – in one door and out the other. It was the day she’d first found herself in the Hunterian Museum. They hadn’t been living in Glasgow all that long. She’d gone for a walk into the university – which was open to the public – with Michael, who had not yet started school. The rain came on and they sheltered in what looked like a cloister – a forest of columns beneath an ornate Victorian building. They waited but the rain seemed as if it was on for the day. Then she saw a sign pointing upwards to a museum. In the lift she guided Michael’s finger to the correct button. When the doors opened into the museum space Michael ran ahead.

  In the entrance hall a series of square stainless steel windows contained exhibits. But dominating everything in a central window was a huge book displaying an image which made Stella stop. She did not know whether to look away or to keep her eyes down in self-preservation or to react with horror or embarrassment. The image was almost life size, of a woman giving birth – no – she was not giving birth. She was at full term and had been thrown open to display the child crammed within her womb – in the head-down act of burrowing into the world. Like Macduff. Untimely ripped from his mother’s womb. It wasn’t how well the artist had captured the grey slipperiness or the violence of the opening technique, what astonished her most was the fullness of the womb. Stella could see herself reflected in the glass, could see how rooted to the spot she was in her pale raincoat. Babies in the womb were like expanding foam. They grew to fit the cavity available. The space was full, the way a Russian doll was full. With another. Full of itself. Not an inch to spare. No room for a needle or bare bodkin to pass through, never mind anything else. And she realised that the flaps of flesh drawn back to reveal the womb’s contents would have been scalpelled in the shape of a cross. Four triangular flaps folded back. A container opened. The big scissors not required. There was nakedness and then there was this. Stripped even of her flesh. Her legs agape, her belly and underbelly revealed. What Stella couldn’t forgive was the reduction of the poor woman’s legs to gigot chops with the bone in. This was the kind of thing the bombers produced in Belfast. She tried to look away from the truncated thighs to the womb itself, bulging with the baby. Somewhere between the baby’s right knee and the index finger, there was a gap. A tiny corridor. Or else it was a miracle. There was a label on the exhibit which she stooped to read. A drawing from William Hunter’s The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures (1774). The word gravid was a mouthful. ‘Full to the brim’ was what her mother would have said. Within its stainless steel frame the space was gravid with the book on display. ‘Enceinte’ came up occasionally in crosswords. The models must have been dead, for this dissection and drawing. This poor woman and her baby had been flayed and displayed. For the sake of knowledge. The artist got a mention, the collector and the anatomist got a mention, but there was nothing about the woman. She was without the dignity of a name. And, of course, her unborn child had not yet had time to be named. She was not a jailbird or a hanged woman, just someone ordinary, a woman who had died on the brink of joy. In the eighteenth century such deaths must have been commonplace. But nobody could tell Stella that eighteenth-century people did not feel the same or as much as people nowadays. So she mourned for them, standing in front of their image, and said a prayer for each of them.

  She was bending over, reading the label, when she heard Michael coming back. The boy appeared and she put herself between him and the drawing. She walked towards him so that he wouldn’t see it and shepherded him back towards the place of dinosaurs and stuffed animals with glass eyes. The questions he would ask. In the time she had taken to look at this drawing she had become it. This was her, had been her. Splayed and wounded. How could she show herself to her own son in such a way.

  Other footsteps approached. A security man in a pale blue shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The museum is closed on a Monday.’

  ‘Nobody said.’

  She took her child by the hand and, feeling glad to be excluded, turned away from the illustration in the monstrous grey book.

  On the street Gerry tightened the knot of his scarf and put up his collar. It could be an opportunity – replenish the bottle, maybe. Stella was best left alone when she went quiet. Again he saw the block of ice. It w
as now cradled in the shallow depression of the dry pavement. Nothing was melting in these temperatures. He tried to remember the direction they had taken to find the place of robust stews. The skyline had the sharpness of an etching, each cornice and gable defined and different – scrolls, pinnacles and garlands precisely delineated. Like cut-outs. The branches of trees, now without leaves, were black against the evening sky. It wasn’t a sunset, just an ending of a cold, clear day – turning from blue, to yellow, to blush.

  A street of trees was being pollarded. At first all he could hear was the noise – glissandi – ascending from gruff to high-pitched scream. He looked up and saw two men in helmets with chainsaws swinging on a leash from their belts, clambering in the trees. The lower end of the street had just been done, leaving the branches like fists against the sky. In the supermarket beside the place of robust stews he bought more Tyrone Superior. He could do with a drink at this very moment, after such a day. To avoid having to make decisions he went to the Irish bar.

  He sat facing the door with a pint of Guinness and a whiskey on the table in front of him. He had watched the Dublin barman pull his black pint and leave it to settle – for the curtains of cream to cascade and form a white priestly collar before topping it off. A poured, but as yet untouched, pint of Guinness has a slight dome to it which reminded him of the faint curvature of the outer wall of Burt Chapel. The Jameson required no interference apart from a drop of water. The Dublin barman was talking quietly to a customer. There was taped Irish music but not at a volume which was irksome.

  Gerry’s hands lay in his lap and his eye was drawn to the window. The end of the daylight striking the glass obliquely created a glittering, grisaille effect. Like ground glass, a layer of dust activated by almost horizontal light transformed the window into Waterford crystal. No expense spared for the Irish pubs of Amsterdam. The admission and exclusion of light. The double function of windows – to admit light and to provide a view. He was hearing the voice of his teachers again. Dr Rice most clearly.

  When he left school in the late fifties Gerry hadn’t a clue what he wanted to do. His subjects were mostly scientific. He’d talked to a careers adviser – a rarity in those days – who, as their meeting came to an end, produced a slip of paper from the mayhem of his desk. It was for a summer job in an architect’s office. Gerry agreed to give it a go. When the summer was over the firm offered him an apprenticeship. He studied nights at the Belfast Tech – learning on the job – showed promise in everything. He was then poached by a Catholic firm who were well in with the clergy and doing lots of schools and churches. At that time you couldn’t cross the threshold of a Catholic church without having your arm twisted to contribute to ‘The School Building Fund’. So there was plenty of work. In the early days Gerry spent much of his time colouring prints – brickwork was red, concrete was green, steel was blue. A kind of architectural storyboard. And going messages. Sent out with the kitty money for biscuits and Maxwell House coffee. Also after Vatican Two everything was full steam ahead on liturgical reforms – which meant the buildings in which faith happened had to be changed – ‘altared’ was the joke at the time – the Pugin-like folderols and backdrops were to be dismantled, the priests had to face the people and the altar rails had to disappear. Then he had the luck to be taken on by Liam McCormick who, at that time, was working on Burt Chapel. Some people – even then – talked of McCormick as Ireland’s greatest architect. The chapel was modelled on Grianan Aileach, a circular Iron Age fort further up the hill.

  Gerry had just met Stella – must’ve been the late sixties – and, not long after the Ballycastle trip, he took her to Donegal to show her what he was working on. They had driven up to the Iron Age fort to see the resemblance to the church they were building at its foot – a shape-rhyme with the chapel, separated by thousands of feet, thousands of years.

  But Stella was more interested in the view. Give or take some trees and a road or two, she said, it was what you would have seen two thousand years ago. With one slow turn of the head you could see the counties of Donegal, Derry and Tyrone, with Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle in the middle of it all. It made her feel glad to be Celtic. Silence in such a place, at such a height, is hard to come by because the wind is always there bluffing your ears into thinking there is no noise. Maybe the bleat of a sheep and no sheep to be seen. She put her hand in the air to find the wind’s direction. Stella. A star with her hair blowing. Eclipsing all else. Her hand in the air.

  What was she on about this afternoon about the flower and the gardener? How would a gardener end a relationship? What sort of a question was that? And this stuff about a religious community. She must be serious because she’d made an appointment to see somebody.

  He sipped his Guinness. Taste, texture, temperature. Perfect. The whiskey could wait until he had the black stuff half finished. It usually took three visits to the glass, each one leaving its stretch marks. The second half took a lot longer now that the thirst had been quenched. He was reluctant to buy the next one until it could be put off no longer. Then he drained both glasses, rose to his feet and approached the bar.

  ‘Same again.’

  He resumed his seat with the two full vessels in front of him. It gave him great satisfaction not to touch them. Enough to know the supplies were in. Their lecturer at the Tech – old Dr Rice – had said architecture was about delivering the services to the client – gas, water and electricity – as elegantly and economically as possible. No more, no less. Oh – it helped if you could draw a straight line freehand and had an eye for what wouldn’t fall down. They were in the business of life saving – building structures that would not kill people. It could be St Peter’s in Rome or a public toilet in Portadown – the same rules applied. Except that there were no rules in Portadown. He was a great teacher and, as he said himself, he liked to give students enough self-confidence to create, yet instil in them enough knowledge to self-doubt.

  The drink was unfurling him. The very place relaxed him with its noises and smells, reflecting the certainty that alcohol was available. Drink made everything easier – easier to feel, easier to find words. Some people he knew were transformed by it into monsters. They became vicious, spiteful and, worst of all, violent creatures. But not him. With a drink or two in him, he loved people, wanted to hug them, not hit them.

  He wondered if he was drinking too much. His memory was getting worse – he couldn’t recall the ends of evenings, couldn’t remember people and their names. Or faces. At home he joked he never would go out again. Indoors he felt safe. Anybody coming to visit him usually made an appointment and their name would go in the appointments diary. On the day, at the appointed time, the bell would ring. He’d glance at the diary and see Jack written there and he’d answer the door and say, ‘How are you, Jack?’ If it turned out to be someone called Billy to read the electricity meter – too bad. If the meter man was called Jack he’d wonder all day how this man had got to be on first name terms with him.

  Stella was the opposite. Not only did she remember people’s names but she remembered everything about them.

  At school he’d loved geometry. There was something about it – its balance, its clarity, the flying buttress of the right-angle sign, the stability of the isosceles triangle. Words like congruent. He loved not only the word but the concept. To be equal, to be the same. There was a time when Stella and he were congruent.

  The best present he ever got at this age was a Bayko building set – a toy to build houses with white walls, red roofs, green bay windows. When the whole thing was finished it was the perfect Enid Blyton house, home for the Famous Five. With a double garage for Uncle Quentin’s cars.

  In the real world with his friends they built huts from dead wood and cardboard and old bits of corrugated iron. When they were finished they sat in them, smiling with satisfaction, wondering what to do.

  It was a career that had let him see the world. Places they would not otherwise have visited. Like Soviet Russia. The land of a
ppalling spalling. In Warsaw Stella wondered aloud why there were so many parks. ‘Ask the Germans,’ she was told. He loved a city with layers – Lisbon had them – you could even take an elevator from one level to another. Upstairs and downstairs. Gerry thought Edinburgh the most wonderful city to look at, all columns and classicism and cut stone. One of the best things he’d seen there was a street act – a juggler getting above himself. At the Art Gallery on the Mound a young lad pressed his feet against two fluted columns, then inched himself up the building – twenty or thirty feet above the heads of the crowd where he juggled with flaming torches. And as he did so everybody realised that there was no way he could get down. He was stuck up there. For ever. If he took the pressure off his feet – either foot – he would plummet. Of course he made a joke of it – his dilemma was the centre of his act – but eventually he jigged his way down to applause – a stuttering descent, like a toy woodpecker sliding down a vertical wire. He made it look easy.

  Gerry ordered himself another drink with a chaser. The barman was good – this time all it took was a nod and a little later the drinks appeared. A thing that really took his breath away was Norman Foster’s roof over the Great Court at the British Museum – the audacity and brilliance of it. The approach inside the building from a periphery of darkness into the thrilling light at its centre – the largest covered square in Europe – was utterly wonderful. If it was about anything, architecture was about shedding light.

  In the presence of such brilliance, having admired it, the next thing Gerry felt was envy. He knew he himself was in League Division Two. Maybe, on a bad day, League Division Three. To have made something which awed people. The pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp. Light streaming into the space through tunnels in thick walls ending as pools of colour on the floor. Light chimneys above altars. The building itself surprisingly small, halfway between an upturned boat and a grand piano. But wonderful – even down to the small scallop shell embedded in the concrete wall to welcome pilgrims.